Gradle 1.0 a step nearer with Milestone 8

The next-gen automation tool hits another milestone – with some important features now incorporated

It was fitting that Gradle’s eighth milestone hit on Valentine’s
Day. The next-generation Groovy-powered build automation tool,
which builds upon Maven and Ant concepts, certainly appears to be a
labour of love that we all can’t wait to get our hands on.

Evolution has always been key for the team behind it and Gradle
1.0 m8 brings some new things to the table. Thanks to a
contribution by Andrew Oberstar, Gradle now includes
several new code quality plugins such as
a FindBug
plugin, a JDepend
plugin and a PMD
plugin. There’s also standalone Checkstyle and CodeNarc plugins
from now on.

Dependency cache resolution has been targeted as well, with new
offline and refresh switches included. Taming the Gradle
daemon has been a big task too, with improvements there
automatically affecting tooling APIs positively. Tooling API thread
safety has been changed for the better and there’s greater
configurability within tooling with standard input, through
configuring Java home or through the JVM. It is now
possible to acquire information about the build environment like
the java home, jvm arguments or the gradle version.

If you want to find out just what Gradle can do, a recent Java
Tech Journal on the entire subject, featuring an interview with
co-creator Hans Dockter,
is here. We eagerly anticipate seeing more of the roadmap be completed. Sure
it’ll be a long progress towards a full stable version, but when it
finally hits, Gradle will be the de facto standard.